Goodbye, Reddit: How the Internet’s Front Page Is Eating Itself
Goodbye, Reddit: How the Internet’s Front Page Is Eating Itself
Reddit’s crisis is a warning for all social platforms: when you trade community for profits, everyone loses. Will Reddit fix its mes...
Money, Mods, and Mayhem
The Turning Point
In 2024, Reddit is a far cry from its scrappy startup roots. With over 430 million monthly active users and more than 100,000 active communities, it's a social media giant. But with great power comes great responsibility, and Reddit is learning this lesson the hard way.
The turning point came in June 2023 when Reddit announced changes to its API pricing. For the uninitiated, API stands for Application Programming Interface, and it's basically the secret sauce that allows third-party apps to interact with Reddit. The new pricing model threatened to kill off popular third-party apps like Apollo, whose developer Christian Selig didn't mince words: "Reddit's API changes are not just unfair, they're unsustainable for third-party apps."
Over 8,000 subreddits went dark in protest.
The blackout should have reminded Reddit’s overlords of a crucial fact: Reddit’s success was built on the backs of its users. The platform had cultivated a sense of ownership among its community, and now that community was biting back.
One moderator summed it up perfectly: “We’re the ones who keep this site running, and we’re being ignored.”
I’d probably be willing to put up with all of the thirst trap OF thots if Spez hadn’t killed Apollo. But no, that asshole just can’t get enough money. Fuck reddit.
Apollo going down is the reason why I'm here on Lemmy. I loved that app as much as I hate ads and I refuse to compromise so I quit cold turkey and never looked back. I'll do the same for youtube if they ever actually figure out how to combat ad blockers effectively for more than a few hours at a time.
I did the same but for Reddit is Fun (android), and I still haunt reddit via browser but I don't sign in or interact.
It's getting to the point where all the good content is also on Lemmy, probably won't take long for lemmy to become peak old reddit with medium sized communities of real people interacting, supporting, educating, and roasting.
We'll probably be at a significantly lower critical mass before the corpos start invading, but hopefully the community can do a great job of reporting each other.
I'd much rather pay a subscription for a spam bot free environment than watch new lemmys pop up every 15-20 years as enshittification bites.
Same for me, but it was Sync for Reddit. Which I'm using at the moment on Lemmy.
I was using RedReader and last I checked it was still active. Originally I thought I'd still follow the local subreddit but I've had zero interest in using Reddit, the people who run it are contemptible.
Disappointing article. It doesn't mention any of what I see as the biggest issues reddit faces right now.
The first issue is that the sense of community has evaporated due to the proliferation of bots, corporate shills, nefarious agents, and god knows what else. Discussions no longer feel like they're happening among regular humans anymore, and either the subject matter experts reddit used to be known for have left or their comments are getting lost in a sea of garbage. I'm not sure Cunningham's Law even applies at reddit anymore, although that's not unique to reddit but rather the general condition of the Internet nowadays.
Which leads to the second major issue: the deteriorating quality of posts and comments. Not only is reddit awash in reposts and Facebook-level content, the subs are apparently all interchangable at this point. I stop by r/all occasionally and while posts that don't quite fit the sub isn't a new problem, now it's like the subs don't even matter: MadeMeSmile-type content is ending up everywhere while meaningless catch-all subs like "r/awesome" are proliferating. I think this is due to bots and the influx of "lowest-common-denominator users," neither of whom are going to be discerning when dishing out upvotes.
The recent situation with r/wholesomememes really showed what's behind the curtain: a house of cards all made up of bots and karma-farmers. The dead internet theory is alive and well at reddit, and who's going to buy advertising on reddit (or content for AI training or Google searches or whatever other Hail Mary sales reddit is currently making in their desperate attempts at profitability) once businesses realize their audience is all machines and other advertisers? This seems like the existential issue for reddit right now, and yet it is completely neglected from the article, which mostly focuses on content moderation (which, yes, is an issue, but it's been an issue/debate/conundrum basically forever on the site).
The bots are why I never looked back. Within an hour posts are flooded with cutesy one-liners. Why would I enjoy conversing with a fucking robot?!
Which leads to the second major issue: ..., the subs are apparently all interchangable at this point. ... now it's like the subs don't even matter: MadeMeSmile-type content is ending up everywhere while meaningless catch-all subs like "r/awesome" are proliferating.
As a long-time user of Vkontakte (VK), the russian Facebook, I've seen it here. Big communities oriented towards diferent groups of people became parts of one long human centipede, because average content made them more clicks and views they could then sell to advertisers. With a deteriorating price of ads it meant that's the only way for them to be afloat, and the feed's algorhytm favored them.
What admins done next is some sloppy tries at cultivating OC or rather downing the visibility of what they've seen as a copied or low-effort content. As mechanics of it were obviously kept in secret, it lead to trial-and-error investigations of how it works and how to evade it. Predictably enough, it was dumb and introduced some unwritten rules for OC creators to be treated like legit posters, while repost farms were first to get the gist of it.
Later, they introduced a random semi-manually approved 'checkmark' called Prometheus, with a fire emoji, that they selecrively put onto some communities for a limited time. As it was promoted, it temporally ups the visibility of one's posts, and it has been verified to boost views to non-subscribers. But, as our classic character Chadsky (!) once said, 'Who are to judge?'. If anything, it made the favoritistic manipulation even more obvious and left the black box of algorythm a secret to mods who, unlike most subreddit mods, really made it their paid work with hired editors and stuff. It reshuffled the informational landscape and highlighted some small creators, but also brought even more garbage due to what (now admins) see as safe and potentially popular.
I suspect Reddit may try something like that at some point.
once businesses realize their audience is all machines and other advertisers?
It's like attending one of those trade shows for Mary Kay or Herbalife etc : the only people there are other salespeople, I assume, and once you realize you're not the consumer but the product, it all starts to feel like a Sunday morning ride home from Vegas.
They’re now willfully being used by the russians to spread misinformation because $$$$ so you can’t even trust anything on there
Hasbarah propaganda is so blatantly obvious there too it's terminally cringe
It’s been that way for 10 years or so.
It’s just another example of enshitification. I felt it was time to move on to the next thing and heard about lemmy. Hopefully federated stuff like this won’t fall prey to the same pattern.
I think Lemmy will be OK as long as users take care not to overcentralize.
When Lemmy dies someday it will be for a different pattern, like issues with bots or problems scaling the moderation capacity.
Ah, Usenet syndrome.
I think a sustainable growth pattern that could help keep this from happening here is one where connected subnetworks of Lemmy servers grow up to a certain point and then eventually split into distinct networks.
There's a critical mass required before it's worth corporate and nation-state troll attention. If networks split off from each other before that mass is reached, then they might never get much attention.
Or if they split a bit after that mass is reached, maybe they waste a bunch of resources and never get a good return on that investment and then the critical mass goes up a bit because there's more risk involved. Plus seeing that shit might make people more receptive of the idea of a split because some still have the idea that more popular = better.
That said, I do see that splitting a network like that won't be easy to do in a way that doesn't hurt communities. I'm also not sure how to handle niche communities, other than pointing out that they existed before Reddit was a thing, they weren't just all concentrated on one website or platform.
i suggest having multiple accounts in many instances especially since i see you are on .world.
if you don't have one, do it now! :)
my guess (100% vibes-based) is .world might consume another couple comms and split off to its own thing. If i'm even right, how much that split affects lemmy depends on how many and how well we users are spread out over the other comms.
I'm happy with the fledgling community we have here. I'm barely interested in what's going on in Reddit anymore, other than taking slight amusement in how the latest announcement or change just ruined the site even more.
Yeah, that was my thought when many people were talking about how to make Lemmy more popular after the initial exodus. My thought was that Lemmy felt a lot more like the Reddit that first attracted me to the platform over a decade ago than Reddit itself had for years. I thought society had moved beyond being capable of what Reddit and older forums used to be.
I don't know if it's because of a subset of people that are awful but only follow crowds, if corporations do things that ruin things once they think they can make money from them, if it's trolls (for their own entertainment or for sowing division with some kind of a sponsor), or some combination of all of those and others. But whatever it is, Lemmy doesn't seem to have that yet. Even the instances that largely got defederated by most of the others were better than the Reddit experience while they were still here, and they didn't stay here for long (plus they still exist, so those who are drawn to that kinda scene can still go there instead of needing to find somewhere else).
Not to mention the bigger the fediverse gets, the more expensive it will be to run servers, which increases the chance that they end up going for sale not because their admins don't want them anymore but because they can't afford them.
I left reddit the day the API changes were announced and haven't gone back since. I miss some of the communities I used to browse but I've checked once or twice and now they're just filled with spam.
I was on there today. I still have an account, funny enough. Mostly because there are certain topics and communities that aren't hosted (or populated) as Reddit. A good example, World of Warcraft.
This is pure copium. Reddit is doing just fine.
I still hop back in semi frequently, it's definitely changed. Feels faker, past its peak with OC content and OC memes being a defining influence on the internet. But yeah, it still has a shitload of regular users.
Kind of reminds me of how digg felt after the redesign.
Reddit's quality has gone down. Seems that's no indication the business is going anywhere.